ARSC New York Chapter MAY 2015 Meeting
7 P. M. Thursday, 5/21/15 At the CUNY Sonic Arts Center West 140th Street & Convent Avenue, New York or enter at 138th Street off Convent Avenue Shepard Hall (the Gothic building) – Recital Hall (Room 95, Basement level) An elevator is located in the center of the building
Preserving "Music at the United Nations"
Presented by Al Schlachtmeyer and Sok-Min Seo
From 1949 to the mid-1980's, two concerts a year of Western Art Music were presented in the Great Hall of the United Nations in New York City. One recognized the founding of the UN in 1948; the other celebrated the adoption of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Featured were the talents of well-known performers such as Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Busch, Charles Munch, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Claudio Arrau, Lazar Berman, Luciano Pavarotti, Marian Anderson, Renata Tebaldi, and Pablo Casals. Virtually all the concerts were recorded and broadcast through syndication around the world. The reel-to-reel tape recordings made from those concerts were, and continue to be, stored in a favorable environment at the UN's headquarters in Manhattan.
Inferring that an archive of those concert recordings existed, Al Schlachtmeyer contacted the UN and began the process of preservation and digitization. Al was inspired by a presentation by Gary Galo and others at the 2010 ARSC conference in New Orleans which recounted the saga of resurrecting "Stokowski's Rarest Recording", Saygun's ‘Yunis Emre’, a secular cantata performed at the UN in 1958 by an impressive array of forces including the Symphony of the AIr. The 600 reel-to-reel tapes have been copied, digitized and returned to the UN archives.
In presenting a selection of excerpts of those recordings, Al will be joined by Sok-Min Seo, the UN's Multimedia Information Officer in its Department of Public Information. Included will be performances by Leonard Bernstein, Charles Munch, the NBC Symphony, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Jasha Heifetz, Lazar Berman, Pablo Casals and Leontyne Price. This program was originally presented at the 2014 ARSC National Conference in Chapel Hill, NC
Al Schlachtmeyer began collecting classical recordings in the mid-1950's and became a member of ARSC in 1967. In the mid-1970s, he and a small group of Midwestern enthusiasts created the American chapter of the Fritz Reiner Society (now inactive) and edited its magazine. From 2000 to 2003, Al served as a contractor at the Library of Congress, concentrating on the digitization of Stokowski's appearances with the NBC Symphony. In 2004, he helped initiate the ARSC Classical Music Preservation Awards. He and his wife live in Alexandria, Virginia
Our next program will be on June 18, 2015
David N. “Uncle Dave” Lewis will present an expanded version of his program WHEN SUMMER IS GONE: THE LIFE & LEGACY OF BANDLEADER HAL KEMP, originally presented at the 2014 ARSC National Conference in Chapel Hill, NC
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DIRECTIONS TO THE SONIC ARTS CENTER Subway: Take the 1 train to 137th Street City College and walk north to 140th St. & Broadway, then go east to 140th St. & Convent Avenue. Take the A, B, C, or D trains to 145th St, go south on St. Nicholas to 141st St, (one long block), then west one block to Convent Avenue, and south one more block to 140th & Convent Avenue. Bus: M4 and M5 on Broadway; M 100, 101 on Amsterdam Ave. (one block West of Convent Avenue) ↂ The Sonic Arts Center at CCNY offers 4-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Music with a concentration in Music and Audio Technology. Their program provides an in- depth curriculum emphasizing real-world skills with a project-based approach. Students enjoy a well-rounded program, with emphasis on audio technology, music theory, orchestration, and history to help them compete in a field that today demands an ever-growing and highly diverse skill set.
All ARSC NY Chapter meetings are free and open to the public. Voluntary contributions to help defray our expenses are welcome!
To join ARSC, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org